Cinemax Brings a Personal Story of AIDS in China to the Screen

Weijun Chen’s film To Live Is Better Than to Die documents a year in the life of a Chinese family living with HIV. China isn’t the first country that comes to mind when we think of HIV in a global context, and the subjects of the film aren’t the Chinese people we generally encounter in the Western media. No neo-capitalists at the Beijing Starbucks here. Ma Shengyi and his family are part of the large population of Chinese peasant farmers who have been left behind during the country’s economic reforms.

In this family of five, four are infected with HIV: both parents and their two younger children. In the late eighties and early nineties, local officials encouraged peasants in Henan province to sell their blood as a way of making money. Lack of proper medical procedures caused a rapid, massive spread of HIV among the local population. In the village where the family resides, sixty percent of those who sold their blood are infected with HIV. There has been some coverage of this situation in the U.S. media, including The New York Times; still, it’s not a well-known international story. This is the background to the film, but it’s not what the film is about. Beyond a statement of how people in the village have contracted HIV, the film doesn’t detail how this happened and what the response has been. What we are shown in the film is the family’s daily life together. Filmmaker Chen’s focus is almost obsessively personal. This was a necessity. In an interview passed along by the filmmaker’s U.S. representative, Chen tells us that dealing with the situation overall would have been “mission impossible”—not allowed. Chen is from Wuhan, 250 miles from the center of the epidemic, and became acquainted with the extent of the crisis through a physician friend. What he shows us is exclusively the family’s space: their house and yard and the gravesite of wife and mother Lei Mei, who dies during the film (off-screen, at a clinic).

Lots of questions come to mind as we watch this film: What kind of medical care is the family receiving, what kinds of programs or social supports are available? While the film does not cover these issues we do get a sense of them and realize that the family’s world is an insecure one: Ma Shengyi manages to get some extra money by sending his youngest child to kowtow at an official’s house on New Year’s. He is tormented by what will happen to his two HIV-infected children if he gets sick. He also tells Chen that people have been telling him to send his older, non-infected daughter away. Despite the harsh lives of its subjects, this isn’t a depressing film. The kids are adorable and there are plenty of happy moments: the children playing together, Ma Shengyi and wife Lei Mei describing how they got together, their oldest daughter being rewarded with a new book bag for her good grades in school. Ma Shengyi emerges as a dedicated father whose love for his children comes right off the screen.

The intense personal focus of the film has given us an account of average people living and persevering in difficult times. Lots of media coverage provides the outrages of a situation, the facts, the blame, the political incompetence, the institutional chicanery, the lack of resources that confront the victims. What we see less of is what we get in this film—those affected living with and continuing on with a new, rotten reality. And that’s generally what the afflicted do—those with HIV and other serious illnesses, those who have suffered loss, those who have suffered assault or repression. In providing this view, Chen gives us a portrait of people who are subjects, not objects: complex people, not pitiful victims.

An update on the family provided to A&U tells us that Ma Shengyi now has a romantic relationship with a widow who is also HIV-positive. He helps her farm and she helps him with the children. Unfortunately, Ma Shengyi’s younger daughter is now sick with AIDS; his infected son, though, is fine at this time.

To Live Is Better Than to Die is a quiet, but memorable film. You’ll both feel for Ma Shengyi and his family and enjoy meeting them.

—Nancy Ellegate

Part of the Cinemax Reel Life series, the film premieres on World AIDS Day, Monday, December 1 at 7 p.m.

Nancy Ellegate reviewed Theory of Devolution, by David Groff, in the October issue.

November 2003